| In the modern world, innovation is a driving societal force, and the arts---following from the progressive movements in the sciences---also place great importance on innovation. In all areas of the arts, producing original work has become a central value in artistic creation and has become synonymous with creativity. It is in pursuit of this originality that young artists must negotiate their relationship with the artworks of the past. At times, young artists avoid studying previous masters' works for fear that such learning will hinder or undermine the cultivation of their originality. Such fears and concerns are often, in turn, reflected in art teaching. They, in any event, form a dimension of what Harold Bloom (1973) called "the anxiety of influence." I wish to re-examine this anxiety by considering the relationship between learning from the past and creating one's own original voice, as the anxiety, harbored within the push for innovation or originality, itself contains the seeds for the questions that it poses about creativity. Since this concern has a broad scope, I will focus my lens on one particular way of learning from the past, which is most telling for the purposes of this discussion: copying. Copying is often perceived as one of the most rigid ways of learning, one that fosters little or no creativity. If creativity, however, can be spurred from such a rigid way of learning as copying, then creativity might also be fostered by learning directly from tradition. Through a comparative study of how copying has been used as a way of learning art in Euro-American and Chinese artistic traditions, I seek to answer the question of how artists and learners evolve from learning from the past to creating distinctive voices. A contemporary thread of the investigation, which inserts it in a domain beyond the historical, is lent by interviews with students and teachers about their experiences and thoughts on copying. |
